


everybody else said

by aclevercollusionofbees



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe, Biting, Bonding, Come Marking, Comeplay, Cunnilingus, Dominance, Drift Sex, F/M, Knotting, Light breathplay, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mildly Dubious Consent, Power Play, Rough Sex, Scenting, Sensory Deprivation, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 08:04:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4012066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aclevercollusionofbees/pseuds/aclevercollusionofbees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Presentation is everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everybody else said

1.

Female alphas make up half a percent of the population. They're considered a glitch, a mistake: what good's an alpha that ruts but can't knot?

It'd figure that no few of them would feel the pull to the jaeger program, to the monstrous machines, and the power and capacity so often denied them elsewhere. Even before Ranger Pentecost pulls her out of Tokyo's rubble, Mako Mori is one of these.

 

2.

On paper, Mako knows everything there is to know about Raleigh Becket. His brother Yancy, too. Every file the PPDC has, every note from their Academy days, every record the PPDC was legally allowed to request from their lives before enlistment: Mako has it all.

She knows Raleigh presented unusually late, partway through his second Academy trimester, and that before then, it had been assumed by his instructors and the staff physicians that he'd turn out a beta like his brother. Alphas are precocious, usually, and his family hadn't thrown an omega in three generations on either side; it was a reasonable assumption. She knows that when he did present as an alpha, five months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he thereafter blew through the Academy like the leading wall of a hurricane, with his brother as trailing (goading) eye.

On paper, drawn from between the lines of the psychologist's notes, the PPDC thinks it knows which Becket was responsible for abandoning post during Gipsy Danger's final sortie. The investigators seem inclined to blame the departed for the idea; Mako is inclined to blame politics for command's refusal to indict an alpha with a history of pushing reckless ideas to completion. Mako respects Becket's strength of will for his accomplishment, but thinks little of the disrespect for orders which preceded it.

Raleigh Becket steps off the chopper, and Mako takes a moment to rue how much paper can't say. He trails after the Marshall, filthy and uncertain and tired enough that he doesn't care he's signaling his every feeling. He smells homesick. He smells _good_. He looks at her and she has to catch her breath.

"I imagined him differently," she says to the Marshall, because she didn't imagine that she'd crave him. Mako knows from the required pres. ed. courses that his immediate appeal is chemical: her olfactory senses are detecting a healthy unmated male in his sexual prime, with a major histocompatibility complex highly dissimilar to hers. This means that in theory, they could breed healthy offspring, and explains why the ozone-and-heated-metal tang of his skin pulls her attention so viscerally.

("Better or worse?" Becket asks.)

There is nothing theoretical in the way she wants to taste his sweat, press her nose (and her teeth) to his throat and _breathe_.

Mako signals none of this. To do so intentionally in company is lewd, doing so unintentionally marks an amateur, and besides, she prides herself on her self-control of her presentation. That she stands in the Marshall's presence is all the more impetus to contain her interest.

Becket, though, proves a cipher. He looks at her, and looks at her, and she scents his surprise and some amusement but otherwise nothing to indicate he's even fractionally as aware of her as she is of him. Hong Kong's humidity carries scent better than Alaska's drier climate, so even out-of-doors on a busy helipad it seems unreasonable to Mako that he would miss her entirely. Just from the polite distance between them Mako can smell that he hasn't gone to rut in at least a year and his last fuck was three months ago. She considers the possibility that he can't filter everything out yet, or that he might be slightly scentblind. (Scentblindness is considered a disability in some cultures, but it's not in Becket's file.)

He answers her thought when she catches him leaning in to scent her while he returns her umbrella.

 

3.

The Kaidanovskies are unthinkable. Unnatural.

Chernobog Alpha is a titan, the first and final-standing jaeger of the old guard, (Cherno Beta and Cherno Omega didn't survive half so long with their tenures stacked together) but more than the jaeger it's Cherno's pilot team that attracts attention.

They walk into the Shatterdome ahead of their Jaeger in tandem, reeking of matescent.

 _Both_ of them.

There's more to it than just biology, or any number of people would carry around the mateclaim of ill-advised teenaged encounters, but a constant prerequisite is and always has been an alpha's knot, the giving and taking thereof. There's a physiological response, pheromonal changes are involved, and the studies have narrowed down an element of intentionality and reciprocality (a rut is not required but it seems to help); and yet the Kaidanovskies stride in, each signaling _claimer_ and _claimed_ for anyone to scent.

(Common theory has it that Sasha must be trans. Not that it is anyone's business.)

"I've heard of them," Becket says to the Marshall. Everyone has heard of them, but Becket seems to possess some tact after all, enough to pull back what he signals inside the confines of the Shatterdome. He screens his presentation even in front of the Hansens, which is no small feat, given Chuck's signaling couldn't be louder if he took his cock out and pissed a circle on the floor around her.

Becket's control doesn't fully slip again until she's showing him to his room and he asks, “So what's your story?” His voice cracks a little before he asks, "You a pilot?"

Becket opens his posture, shows his throat in acknowledgment of his territorial disadvantage, signals interest and inquiry both at once. She might be more offended if not for the note of seeking desperation in him; he seems to want her approval near as much as she wants to see him stripped in supplication before her, but that doesn't excuse his impertinence. (She's an _alpha_ , the suggestion she might accept anyone else's claim is an insult of itself.)

Mako cuts into him with her response and takes no pleasure in the unsettling way he _retreats_. She crosses the hall to her own quarters, disturbed and a little aroused, and disturbed by herself for feeling so. What makes him appealing to her also makes him forbidden, and she's not Chuck Hansen, to get off on taking advantage of a vulnerability that shouldn't exist. He's broken and doomed but he's still an alpha, and she's better than that. Except then Becket crosses his room shirtless and damp and she realizes she _isn't_.

It's a display, an unmistakeable, unapologetic offering, and even as she catalogues the still livid scars she considers his body (it is a _very_ nice body) and thinks, _Mine_.

 

4.

The algorithms suggest Becket would work best with a beta at his 02, to steady him, so Mako brings in the best of the Academy's surviving betas, filters out the glory-seekers and those prone to recklessness, and finds the remainders now being pressed unforgivingly into the mats of Hong Kong's kwoon.

Becket fights with an elegance and economy that belies the brutality that moves him. For all that he subdues each of them in increasingly humiliating ways, he spends less and less of his dwindling attention on them, instead choosing to focus on―

Mako has his records from the Academy. Becket wasn't this good, then; the older brother's winning record was enough to carry the younger's lackluster performances, and none of the critiques then blamed Raleigh Becket's losses on lack of focus.

Becket is distracted now, and still devastatingly effective. He fights like a man who has fought for survival, asked suddenly to fight for sport. She sees an edge of the Weis in him and scoffs at the comparison. (Even when they outmatch their opponents, they try not to make the others feel _lesser_.) It isn't until he points his hanbo at her in challenge that she realizes he noticed—that neither he nor anyone else could have _failed_ to notice—her displeasure because she was signaling it to the room so blatantly.

"It's a dialogue, not a fight," he says.

Their dialogue goes like this:

_You tried to find someone to match me_ _—_

She sets him on his knees.

_—_ _and the only person in this room who can is you._

She puts him on his back, forces him to show his throat, and even then he won't look away from her face, won't fully yield, won't...

 

Becket's resentment is a mere fraction to hers when the Marshall tells them _No_. But as she explains to him in the hall between their quarters, it's not obedience that commands her compliance.

(She closes her door before he can scent just how much she likes the sound of the word _obey_ in Becket's mouth.)

 

5.

It isn't in the records that in their second trimester at the Jaeger Academy, Raleigh almost killed his brother over a girl.

It isn't in the records, and before their drift, Mako didn't know, but in retrospect she finds herself grateful for the oversight. Knowing would have changed everything, would have found him matched to ~~someone else~~ someone more suitable than the candidates she chose.

After their drift, the idea of anyone else piloting with Raleigh leaves an aggravating itching feeling behind her eyelids.

After their drift, Mako finds herself grateful for Yancy Becket's well-meant failings. The idea of anyone else having Raleigh as she does now...

 

6.

So far as insults go, _chemical bitch_ is inexcusably rude. Presentation is somewhat linked to one's physical configuration, but has very little to do with actual gender or sexual preference. At birth, nearly every infant with a penis has a bulbus glandis, just as those born with vaginas possess those structures necessary to form a coital lock. The term was first applied to male-identified omegas, for their desperate fruitless heats, but transferred well enough to female alphas.

The thing to remember then, is that when Chuck Hansen says, “One of you chemical bitches needs a knot,” he's both cruel and clever. It's a filthy pun, an insult to both of them, because even into recent history it was thought that near any malady of the spirit or mind could be fucked into submission by an alpha's knot.

Raleigh doesn't need to tell Chuck to apologize, and no one intervenes when Raleigh puts Chuck to the floor and holds him there for his father to collect.

Certain things are _understood_.

 

7.

They return from battle exultant and a-fever with their success. Raleigh's euphoria runs under her own like a hummingbird's heartbeat, too quick to make out any kind of meaning.

Mako thinks her heart will burst from joy when the Marshall says, "I'm proud of you." He continues, "I'm proud of us all," and abruptly stops when the spike of heat-scent hits the gathered crowd like a sudden shift of gravity.

The PPDC issues suppressants to any omega working inside the Shatterdomes, but stress-heats happen, are known to have broken through any number of suppressant combinations, and to rights everyone in the Hong Kong Shatterdome should be dead right now if not for Gipsy Danger and her crew.

Beside her, Raleigh sucks in a deep breath and goes very, very still. He throws his panic into their Drift as he throws his gaze around the crowd, searching for a quick exit, and when he looks to Mako she suddenly understands: it's not as she thought at first, that it had been a long time since he'd gone to rut. It is that he has never allowed himself to, and he doesn't want to start _now_.

Mako takes a breath of her own, and thinks if he's planning to fight it that he's certain to be disappointed. The kaiju are more easily fought, and for all his strength of will he can't overcome both his instincts and the bleedover from hers through the Drift.

Raleigh is an unmated heterosexual male, Mako an unmated bisexual female. The omega in question is female, unmated, and therefore of potential interest to both of them. Mako feels the rut rising in her already, spurred on into an earlier, sharper intensity than she's ever experienced before, and considers the increasingly restive crowd around them. Alphas make up nearly half of the PPDC, but in these cases it had never been a concern before _—_ whichever Jaeger team had seniority at a particular Shatterdome was responsible for handling unexpected heats, but the Weis and Kaidanovskies are dead now (and God, she will mourn them when instinct isn't pulling her apart), Herc has a broken arm, and the Marshall is too senior for his involvement to be ethical.

If she doesn't get Raleigh out of this crowd, now, the consequences will be bloody. (For whom is a question with which she chooses not to concern herself.) Mako looks to the Marshall, then Raleigh and back, and Sensei nods acknowledgment.

They're both alphas, heading into the thick of rut, but they're copilots first, and Mako won't leave him to this alone, won't let him try to get through this alone. They can take care of each other.

The Marshall orders the crowd to disperse, calls for Herc and his rut-dazed son to follow him, and leaves Mako and Raleigh to be separated and stripped down by Gipsy Danger's drivesuit crew. Mako can't speak of much else of the experience besides their professionalism and appreciable speed. The decon shower to take care of the relay gel is a little cold, but it's not until they're pushed out into the corridor together that Mako learns it's Raleigh's teeth chattering and not her own.

Raleigh withdraws into himself on the way back to quarters, looks away and down and signals so little Mako might not notice him at all if she weren't hyperaware of each stray bead of water inching down the back of his neck, or the way his jaw clenches with every short indrawn breath. Those tight breaths turn to full pants by the time he stands outside his own door; he nods and gives her a small, strained smile and turns to ascend his stairs, _alone_.

Mako studies the shadow he's made of himself in her head and signals everything she wants. She got a taste of it in battle, what it felt like to live inside his head, to live in his skin, to want so viscerally as he wants her. Raleigh shakes his head and grounds out, "I didn't... not like this."

Another wave of heat-scent washes through the corridor, chased by a male groan Mako recognizes far too well. Raleigh takes a step back, and his breath kicks up; he signals nothing, but the low needy moan rising in his chest tells her everything.

Mako slowly ascends his stairs, takes the keys from his hand, unlocks his door, and follows him in. She leans back against the door after she closes it and surveys the room. He's put up a few photos, but otherwise there doesn't seem to be anything particularly breakable lying around. Raleigh stands in the center of the room and watches her like a wary prey animal.

When she steps forward, he steps back and back, until there are no further steps he can take, and only inches left between them.

His stubble tickles her palms when she reaches up to turn his face to hers. "I'm not going to hurt you," she says.

Raleigh's eyes (pupils almost dilated, and what are hers doing, she wonders) meet hers at last, and into the Drift he thinks, _no, but I'll hurt_ you.

Mako quirks her brows at the idea, and her lips twitch a moment before she sets her mouth on his throat to taste him. Raleigh shudders against her but doesn't move, doesn't breathe, so she runs her teeth down to his collarbone and bites him—not hard enough to bruise, just enough to get his attention.

Raleigh sucks in a breath and _moves_. He puts his hands on her and turns, lifts her and slams her into the wall he fled to hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. He grinds his hips into hers, so she can feel how hard he is (very), and he can feel how hot she is, how wet she is for him, even through the few layers between them. She'd thought ahead, dressing after the showers, opted to forgo panties and her bra, and does not regret the decision at all as Raleigh's fingers scrabble at the hem of her shirt. She wraps her legs around his hips and helps him pull the button-up and the tank beneath it up-and-over, then tugs at his sweater and undershirt as well.

At her back, the wall is cool, in contrast to the incredible heat of him before her. She runs her thumbs down the tense ridges of his abs while he bends his head to her neck to scent her, to be _sure_ , and she hums her pleasure at his hitching breaths. Between her breasts, his dog tags clink and tangle with hers. When she moves her fingers to his waist and belt buckle, his whole frame flinches away; she has to clutch at his shoulders not to lose her balance while she regains her feet, but then he's undoing the buttons of her trousers and pushing down the waistband. Not so skittish after all, her Raleigh.

The thought must pass through the Drift, because Raleigh's fingers go fumbling and clumsy at her hips all at once. "It's been... a while," he admits. His voice is hoarse, though the corners of his mouth keep twitching up. He's torn between wanting to be good for her, to be kind, and wanting to fuck her raw. Mako approves either way, so long as he gets his cock in her _now_. She kicks off her unlaced boots and steps out of her trousers, then hooks her thumbs into Raleigh's belt loops to pull him into her again.

He looks to her. _Yes_ , she thinks to him, nods. _Yes_. His only thought in response is her name, and it echoes through him like a heartbeat as she unfastens his trousers and drags his boxers down and over his cock ( _God_ , he has a beautiful cock, thick and heavy in her hands) and he lifts her up and open—

They both cry out with that first deep thrust. Mako had attended the Academy with what should have been the fifth generation of pilots/he'd heard the rumors/their brother Yancy had talked about how weird it was/even after three years of piloting she'd never/Sensei warned him to be careful about what he took into the Drift because his partner w—

They feel it all. They feel together.

It takes a moment to remember whose fingertips are digging into whose ribs, and whose thighs clench at the drag and friction between them; they breathe together, they feel together, does it matter? They move together, and slowly the delineating bounds between them resolve a little clearer.

She feels what it feels like, to him, to fill her cunt, to feel her slick and open for him, to burn beneath the clutch of her nails at his back. He feels what it feels like for her, full and hard and achingly _good_ with each increasingly uncautious thrust, and it's that assurance that spurs him to give her what she wants, as roughly as he wants to give it to her. With another shift, his belt buckle catches and bites into her inner thigh and that too is good, in a sharply pleasing way that goads the growing need sitting low in her belly.

Raleigh feels it too, and though he's as silent as he was during their spar in the kwoon, she knows he's nearly as close as she is. Mako shifts her hand to his shoulder and without needing a word Raleigh nods, breathless, steadies his grip on her thighs and carries her the few feet to the bed. She doesn't need more than the change of angle and a few hard thrusts to shudder into orgasm around him, but Raleigh pulls out before he can follow her and the lack of completion tears through the Drift and her like an open wound.

It's an unforgiveable offense to knot a fellow alpha, an alpha's every instinct drives against it. Chuck Hansen might be a rude, irreverent bastard, but even when they were still friends and occasional fuckbuddies in the Academy, he never came to a knot inside her. He always pushed away, pushed her off, finished himself with his hands before taking care of her orgasm, and he'd known even then how much she hated him for it. Not that he didn't knot her, but the way he knotted at all, she had hated how he wrapped his hand around it and groaned his pleasure through his teeth, how he got to have what she couldn't.

Raleigh's manners are better already for having gotten her through her own climax first, but if he thinks she'll be satisfied with just that, with watching him like that... He can knot, and they're still feeling _together_.

Mako makes the decision, before she can change her mind and before Raleigh can protest, pushes him to his back and follows with the motion until she's atop him and sinking down onto his cock again. She jerks her hips once, sharply, to take him all the way, fighting both his instincts and her own, presses his hands to the mattress, and orders him, "Come."

He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head, thinks _won't_ , thinks _no_. She presses the point, demands _why_ , and then she learns: in their second trimester at the Jaeger Academy, Raleigh almost killed his brother over a girl.

Four months after Raleigh presented, a month before his eighteenth birthday, they met a girl named Naomi, an omega. She wanted a Jaeger pilot, she got one, and Yancy Becket came back to base stinking of omega heat as his brother was going into his first rut. No small wonder Raleigh nearly ripped his throat out, except for how badly Raleigh took it afterwards, how terrified he was for almost ruining their only chance—he not only kept himself from a real rut, he never allowed himself anything even close to _this_. If Mako weren't an alpha, maybe then, but...

But she _is_ , and she _wants_ , and she can be sorry for it later. Raleigh tips his head back and breathes through his teeth, gives her his throat and an idea. Mako shifts her grip from his hands to his throat, sets her thumbs against his trachea, and just as he's about to take a breath, she presses down.

Raleigh's eyes snap open at once, dizzy with denial and desire and panic. He thinks, _Mako??? What_ _—_

She lets go, leans into him signaling want and lust and _want_ and claim, and says again, " _Come_."

Raleigh takes a breath and comes, and Mako with him. Mako feels the heat and swell of his knot inside her, thicker and thicker stretching her cunt. She feels what it feels like to knot her, and loses track of who's feeling what again, because she's feeling so _much_. She notes, idly, the silent groan he exhales, the ache in her (his?) jaw from gritting her teeth, and fights to keep her hips down, to take his knot, she battles every instinct between them screaming how wrong this is.

There's nothing wrong in the way Raleigh lies spread out beneath her and gasping and arching up as he comes in her and comes in her. She blinks, and for a moment sees through both his eyes and her own, sees how his cock fits flush in her and the way her hips hitch to match the tense and release of his balls and how—

She's an alpha, but her cunt locks around his knot the same as anybody else's would. (She finds herself unaccountably relieved for it, that being an alpha doesn't negate being a woman, no matter what everybody else said.)

This doesn't _feel_ wrong. Raleigh looks up at Mako like he did in the kwoon, pleased and reverent, and the surge of possession she feels doesn't feel wrong. She feels aching and filthy, conquered and conquering. Satisfied, but not wrong.

Mako looks down at Raleigh and thinks, _Mine_. He looks back and says, "One-zero."

Oh. Is that so now?

 

They find ways to pass the time while Raleigh's knot subsides in her. Afterwards, he slips down to the floor between her knees and nips at her belly with a wicked grin before moving even lower.

Mako straightens, startled. "But, you just—"

The look he gives her in response lives somewhere between amused and affronted; Mako can't help but laugh, until he puts his mouth on her and proves just how much he doesn't care. There is nothing amusing in the press of the tongue against her clit, or in the way he hooks his fingers inside her, as if to drag an orgasm out of her.

After the second time she comes under his tongue, he pulls his fingers from her, and with them some of the thready come he fucked into her. He keeps his eyes on hers as he tongues the bruise his belt buckle pinched into her and smears a sticky line of come across her other thigh. She squirms a little at the tickle of his stubble, then yelps when he suddenly bites down. He looks up expectantly at her glare, and then tells her to lie back and close her eyes. _I'll know if you peek._

("One-one," he murmurs smugly into her shoulder, after.

"Fuck you," she gasps into his sheets.

_If you insist..._ )

 

The third time is for pleasure.

Seven hours after the need of the rut chased them to his quarters, there's no more feeling of violation when his cock swells to knot again inside her, only a pleasurable ache. Raleigh gives freely of himself, pours his orgasm into her, fills her up; more than his knot and his come, his pleasure floods her body. When the pulse of his orgasm slows and settles within her, she arches into him for that little extra edge of friction, and gasps into his mouth when he rocks his hips to give it to her.

He kisses her then, shyly, as if it's not his knot filling her cunt, or the salt of his sweat drying on her body, or his come slicked on her thighs, belly, breasts. He kisses her like he loves her and thinks, _Mine_. Mako runs her fingers through his hair and hums. He's _hers_ , she supposes she can accept his claim on her in turn.

 

8.

Chuck and Stacker drift in uncomfortable silence on the slow descent into Challenger Deep. There's no way to start a conversation that won't be profoundly embarrassing, and Chuck's never been all that inclined to chat with his copilot, so he's not going to go against precedent and start now.

So they don't talk. Chuck doesn't talk about how the omega he fucked out of heat looked enough like Mako for him to pretend, and the Marshall doesn't talk about his father, and neither of them talk about how Gipsy Danger's pilots came out of Becket's quarters smelling so well-fucked they might as well have been mated.

In a few hours they'll all be dead anyway, does no good to talk it out, but when that moment comes, they think together, _We can clear a path for the lady_.

 

9.

"I can finish this alone," Raleigh says. He thinks of what Mako would think about that, how she'd call him stubborn, adds ruefully, "All I have to do is fall. _Anyone_ can fall."

He watches her rise to her pod and remembers suddenly how she told him, _The Marshall has his reasons_.

So does he, now.

 

10.

Mako wakes on the water, alone. It's not supposed to be like this, it's wrong, because Raleigh's not with her and she hears _I can finish this alone_ pounding in her head like a pulse. Her cunt doesn't ache like a bruise so he could learn nothing, she thinks a little hysterically, but then the second pod surfaces and she recognizes Danger's pods because she refurbed them herself.

Except he's not breathing. She can't feel him in the Drift and he's not breathing. Perched above him as she is, she expects to see him smiling up at her, dragging her hips forward to his mouth again, mocking her for being sore (not from fucking, as she expected, but from combat itself), and that she hadn't expected that was a startling oversight for him to capitalize on, it shook her how much she liked his laugh, and he's. not. breathing.

 _Don't do this to me_ , she thinks as she pleads his name, _I didn't give you permission to go_.

She refuses to let the kaiju steal anything else from her, they took her family twice, they stole her home, if they take her m—

In her arms, Raleigh draws a slow breath.

**Author's Note:**

> this is not my reg thing, so, uh, hope you liked?? reviews'd be great, thx!
> 
> (also jesus christ don't choke each other out, the fbi's probs watching me now cause of my bing searches, but that's the big lesson to takeaway from this, don't chock each other out ok?)


End file.
